Bad Writing as Conformism
I tried to read "Entitlement", a book about class and an entitled old man and a young woman who works for him
It is difficult to pinpoint what is wrong with the current crop of writers, most of whom attended universities with Creative Writing programs designed to “mold” or “shape” writers’ voices (the writer I am lamenting in this piece, Rumaan Alam, went to Oberlin.)
This current style is both aggressively emotional and coldly profound. The writing style wants you to feel, badly. Repetition is used insistently. The writer insists that life is monotonous, a series of tasks to complete.
I think the goal here is transference. To allow the reader in to the characters life. This technique does not work. We need the inner life of these main characters. Or we need rapid fire, opaque, litigious dialogue which conceals the inner life of the characters. The mundane, faux-profound narration of life as its’ waves break on an urbanite running errands in 2023 and thinking about her job is “not it.”
How to break out of this sameness? Well, I have been doing it by reading Kate Chopin and Ernest Hemingway, two of Americas’ most honest and selfless writers.
What does it mean to be a selfless writer? To me, it means pushing your characters out past you, narrating their collisions with the world and their collaborations with other contradictory people truly and plainly, without intruding with self-important style and ornamentation. The writing programs at Oberlin (and Princeton and the New School and UC Irvine, etc.) must be teaching this wrong. How else to explain the sameness and the sheer number of writers who make the same mistakes?
Entitlement by Rumaan Alam. 2025. Penguin Random House. Cover art by Meghan Cavanaugh
The political and social insistencies of this book are unclear. The cover artwork depicts a woman sitting in an apartment in New York, watching the sunset outside of her building and …thinking? She is probably feeling sorry for herself, but we will never know. This cover is the result of a generation of college goers reading Foucault and Butler all through humanities university classes. The covers they design are collages, swooping flicks of color, forces appearing and sweeping the world, tossing women and men around like subjects of sociological forces.
The lagunas in which people can choose and take action are of no interest. Rather, the sum of a life is the self-pitying accounts of days spent in “late-stage capitalism”, struggling against unseen forces, and moving boulders up hills. Evil, straight, white, male hills.
This end of characters who act and then take responsibility for their own actions leaves us with main characters who seem like children. They have a fundamental childishness, blaming all problems on ruthless, all-pervasive forces like patriarchy, historical momentum, inertia in progressive movements, and the sad, bittersweet, enticing, teasing beauty of a world misgoverned and rife with greed and evil.
These themes are worthy of novels. But not novels written like this. Not like this.